HEATHROW DIRECTOR
I know you can't believe it. The "problem" with ATCOs such as yourself is that you see the world through a British perspective. You've been surrounded by British ATCOs; ATCOs who are genuinely interested in aviation, know their aircraft types, strive to be the best, are genuinely interested in their jobs, have generally outstanding professional attitudes and while they have beefs with their employers, they leave it at the door when they come to work.
These are people who wanted to be controllers first and not just public servants first because it meant they were secure for life regardless of wether they made any effort or not. People who had aptitude and had to compete for coveted positions. Not because they had family ties to those who recruited.
Now reverse all of the above and you are dealing with Spanish ATC.
This a video of controllers on active duty. Can you believe it? They were so proud of it they posted it to YouTube!:
Having lost a spat with their employers and trying to hold the country and the economy to ransom in an illegal strike they were brought to heel in an extremely abrupt fashion by the government who used a national state of emergency to force them back to work and had the military supervise them.
The next step was to find any obscure guidance or long forgotten rules and take the most obscure meaning from them and try to use these to deliberately slow traffic and create congestion that simply wasn't there. Then to deny any assistance and common sense help to expedite traffic: long winded SIDs, standard routing, denial of climbs or descents other then flight plans.
Now we have these spoilt brats playing Russian roulette with safety. I don't say that lightly. This BCN incident stinks of the usual game they are playing. I mean for goodness sake, we even had a Spanish controller on here last summer saying he denied an airliner a descent due to moderate/severe turbulence because he was unhappy! The phrase he used was roughly this "They were all calling for descents and climbs to avoid turbulence, but with me they will never climb. I am unhappy in my work"
Those of us who have to operate into MAD and BCN are painfully aware that those behind the screens are quite happy to use ourselves, our passengers and our aircraft to try and prove a point. They want something serious to happen, I am sure of it, so they can stand back and testiculate that the government is making the skies unsafe in a misguided and frankly astonishing attempt to get their previous salaries back.
You could never behave like that and that is why you and the others on this board who do not operate into and out of Spain will never understand.
I am all for workers rights and fair representation of workers but what you had here was a bunch of highly paid public servants who milked the system dry and when the country was facing financial ruin tried to hold it to ransom and continue to do so. For that they should, as has been said above, all be sacked. Reagan style.